Electronic band structure of coiled carbon nanotubes

Abstract

More than fifteen years have passed since the first report of experimental evidence of regularly coiled carbon nanotubes, but, the structure, formation mechanism and theoretical aspects of these nanotubes still remain unresolved. We propose model of hexagonal, helically coiled single wall carbon nanotubes, determine their line group symmetry and calculate electronic band structure of the relaxed configurations by means of fully symmetry adopted density functional tight binding method implemented into the POLSym code. Electrical properties of the straight and coiled carbon nanotubes of different chiralities are compared and analyzed.